Sunday, August 26, 2012

The Common Dreams website ran a great essay on the stultifying reporting (not to be confused with journalism) of the presidential campaigns. It describes the corporate media's 'suffocating, self-imposed conformity of reporters and commentators' which results in an obsession with tactics and particularly the facile horse race/polling punditry - all at the expense of serious, issue-based journalism. The conscious blacklisting of smaller party and independent candidates is also mentioned.

Monday, August 20, 2012

The excellent YES! magazine has a good article on how the city of Chicago is trying to expand ease of use and access for bicycle commuters. Another points out that municipalities who make biking a priority provides benefits everyone, not just cyclists.

Sunday, August 19, 2012

A couple of recent stories highlight the current ethical state of the corporate media.

Yapping head David Gergen, a senior analyst at CNN, came under fire for not being sufficiently transparent about his ties to Bain Capital, the private equity firm once lead by GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney. In addition to yapping about the current presidential race, Gergen has been a spinmeister in the administrations of presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton.

The Huffington Post reported: Gergen, while acknowledging his "bias" on Monday [July 16], wrote how he's "come to admire and like the leaders of Bain Capital" because the firm "stands out for the respect in which it is generally held and for the generous philanthropy of some of its partners."

Commentator Andrew Sullivan said this embodied "what's wrong with the press corps."

And he's right. This is hardly the first time the corporate media has offered openly biased observers, under the guise of objective analysts, with financial ties to topics they were discussing.

I suppose this isn't surprising since, while liberals like to single out Fox, there is precious little journalism on any of the so-called cable news channels. It's all speculation and analysis... apparently corrupted analysis.

But there is a different form of corruption, which shows the degree to which the 'watchdog' media is in bed with, or perhaps afraid of, those it's supposed to be watching.

The Guardian, much derided by one regular reader of this blog but a much more vigorous watchdog than any daily in this country,reported that several major US media outlets have been submitting quotes to the campaigns of President Obama and Mitt Romney for approval before publication. The UK daily cited The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times as papers who were reviewing this policy.

The Guardian reported: Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at New York University agreed that "this is not a new problem", but said it had got worse.

"There have always been sources that tried to win these terms, and lately more and more have succeeded. What was new and significant in the Times story was that quote approval is now the norm for a whole layer of campaign sources; most of the reporters working the beat had already come to terms with that, the Times suggested."

Rosen said that reporters told him that the process has been building for years under George Bush and nowBarack Obama.

It is not clear why this was done. But the corporate media has shown that it prizes one thing above all else: access. It doesn't seem to care if it actually uses that access for any sort of public service, as long as the reporters (not all of them act as journalists) get invited to fancy parties and White House comedy jam sessions. I suspect the quote approval abdication of duty was done to preserve this meaningless access.In an industry that pats itself on the back as the national guardian of transparency and questioning - the party line is the democracy would collapse if such sycophantic reporting disappeared - the degree to which the big corporate media outlets themselves are compromised would shock a lot of people.

Then again, given the decreasing respect in which the media is held, maybe it wouldn't.

Update: James Fallows has a good column on how the media will have to start understanding the difference between 'objectivity' and 'neutrality.' It's telling how truly substantive investigative reporting - Fallows for The Atlantic, Seymour Hersch for The New Yorker, Matt Taibbi for Rolling Stone and independent author Prof. Chalmers Johnson - is all found outside the context of daily newspapers and television.

Saturday, August 18, 2012

Eight of the top nine “contributors” to Mitt Romney’s campaign are financial institutions - including some who contributed to the economic meltdown like Wells Fargo and Bank of America.

Most of the big “contributors” to President Obama’s campaign are big tech and telecommunications conglomerates and law firms - like net neutrality opponents Time Warner and Comcast.

The poll questions that are now a substitute for political journalism shouldn’t ask which candidate you’re going to vote for. They should ask which set of corporate interests you are going to waste your vote on.

Wednesday, August 01, 2012

The Post-Star seems intent on making its reach as small as possible, somehow calculating this will help their bottom line. Despite plummeting quality, such as managing to misspell the name of its own hometown in a baseball box score yesterday, and a rapidly shrinking workforce, the Glens Falls daily has seen fit to nearly triple its newsstand price in the last few years.

On May 1 of this year, the paper announced that it would be imposing a paywall on its website. Users would be limited to 15 free article views per 30 days.

Apparently without warning (I can not verify this due to the restrictions), the paper at some point recently has reduced this to 10 free articles.

About Me

The author is a freelance writer and journalist who lives in upstate New York. He served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Republic of Guinea (Conakry), West Africa, in the mid-90s. He is also fluent in French.
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L'auteur est un journaliste et écrivain qui habite le nord de l'Etat de New York. Il fut volontaire professeur de maths au sein du Corps de la Paix américain; il serva en République de Guinée (Conakry) en Afrique de l'Ouest dans les années 90.